Congressional Budget Office

While many in the 'resistance' have vociferously denounced the Senate tax reform bill in the last 48 hours, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers took the proverbial biscuit by warning that "thousands will die as a consequence of this new tax bill."

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the tax bill could reduce insurance coverage by 13m people, which to be conservative we can round down to 10m people.

 

At the request of Nancy Pelosi, the Congressional Budget Office has just released a study intended to better understand the potential economic impacts that would result from the cancellation of taxpayer funded Obamacare subsidies (a.k.a. "cost-sharing reductions" or "CSRs").  The report is entitled "The Effects of Terminating Payments for Cost-Sharing Reductions," and, among other things finds that cutting CSRs would cause a 20% spike in Obamacare premiums in 2018 and result in a $194 billion increase in the deficit from 2017 through 2026.

Here are the highlights:

Even as the Republican effort to repeal Obamacare in recent months has suffered one humiliating loss after another, at the hands of none other than the very same Republican party, one government agency has been repeatedly scapegoated for the GOP's failure to come up with a credible and passable alternative to Obamacare: the Congressional Budget Office. Then agan, while hardly an excuse for their sheer incompetence, the GOP is certainly right to point the finger at the CBO's track record of "forecasts", one which we have mocked here on occasion after occasion after occasion.

During her tesimony this morning, Fed Chair Janet Yellen urged Congress to take into account the growth trajectory of the federal debt when making decisions about spending and taxation.

She said lawmakers need to work toward achieving "sustainability of this debt path over time," ...

"Let me state in the strongest possible terms that I agree" the U.S. federal debt trend is unsustainable, may hurt productivity, and living standards of Americans.

In a just released report from the CBO looking at the long-term US budget outlook, the budget office forecasts that both government debt and deficits are expected to soar in the coming 30 years, with debt/GDP expected to hit 150% by 2047 if the current government spending picture remains unchanged.

The CBO's revision from the last, 2016 projection, shows a marked deterioration in both total debt and budget deficits, with the former increasing by 5% to 146%, while the latter rising by almost 1% from 8.8% of GDP to 9.6% by 2017.